The Law: Mr. Smith Comes to the A.B.A

Moving through the crowd, the white-haired, chunky, effervescent lawyer works as hard as a campaign politician. A crunching squeeze of the arm for one man, a glad-handshake for the next, hugs for all the wives. Then, with his back-country Florida drawl, he exhorts his fellow attorneys—this time about the need to weed out incompetent practitioners perhaps, even by requiring periodic retesting of lawyers. It is all said with an ingratiating charm and leavened with warming phrases about law as the "major bulwark between man and his government." At the...